Virtualization Management

Virtualization Management covers all aspects of managing a modern virtual or software defined data center. This includes managing across virtualization platforms and clouds, monitoring the performance and availability of the virtualization platforms (hypervisors) and the clouds, monitoring the capacity of the virtualization platforms and clouds, ...

monitoring the performance of the applications running on these platforms and clouds, automatically provisioning these environments, securing these environments, and ensuring that the data in these environments is always protected and available.

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Citrix’s annual Synergy conference held this week in San Francisco was kicked off with CEO Mark Templeton painting his view of the future, and the building and leveraging of cloud services. With the emergence and evolution of cloud services, Templeton believes that the industry has moved out of the PC (personal computing) era into a PC-3 era, incorporating personal, private, and public cloud services.

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Attempting to infer the performance of a database server by looking at resource utilization metrics will fail technically and organizationally. In a shared and dynamic environment, the only way to truly assess the performance of an element of the infrastructure or an application is to measure how long it is actually taking to do its job. This makes response time and its companion metric latency into the two most important metrics for virtualized and cloud based systems.

The problem is that not everything is as black and white as security folks desire. If we implement performance and other management tools, we often need to expose part of our all important virtualization management network to others. But how do we do this safely, securely, with minimal impact to usability? Why do we need to this is also another question. You just have to take one look at the Virtualization ASsessment TOolkit (Vasto) to realize the importance of this security requirement. But the question still exists, how do you implement other necessary tools within your virtual environment without impacting usability?

VMTurbo has delivered a new free vSphere performance and capacity management solution that is neither time nor size of environment limited, and that breaks new ground in terms of capacity management functionality delivered in a free solution. The automatically generated VM Rightsizing Recommendations should prove to be of particular value to vSphere administrators.

Public Cloud SLA’s are worthless. They need to be replaced by metrics that measure the responsiveness of what the cloud provider owns to the layer of software from the customer running in the cloud. Developing these metrics will require significant changes to existing APM approaches in order to be able to separate time spent in the application from time spent in the application framework or OS.

BMC has acquired Coradiant the leader in web applications performance management. Now it remains to be seen if BMC will follow up this step with additional steps to create a modern monitoring stack suited for virtualization and the cloud, or if BMC will under-utilize Coradiant’s assets by simply integrating Coradiant with its legacy systems management framework.

Running VMware on legacy infrastructure is like driving a Ferrari on a gravel road. If you look at what is run in most production VMware environments today, the only really new things in the environment is VMware vSphere, and possibly some new monitoring, security and backup tools. We have barely started to reinvent everything that needs to be reinvented in order to properly take virtualization, IT as a Service and public clouds to their logical and most beneficial conclusions.

Many enterprises see virtualization as an opportunity to dump what they perceive as expensive, inflexible, and difficult to use enterprise management tools in favor of ones built for the new dynamic data center. Other enterprises simply view virtualization as one more silo that that needs to be managed with existing tools. Veeam’s nworks products clearly cater to the group who fall into the latter category.

In Applications Performance Equals Response Time, not Resource Utilization, we took the position that while for the majority of the applications deployed on physical hardware the general practice was to infer their performance by looking at normal vs. abnormal resource utilization statistics, once you virtualize an application, it becomes necessary to directly measure its response time in order to ensure adequate service to business constituents and end users.